1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to computer network systems and in particular to multi-session continuity in computer network systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Time Sharing Option (TSO) and Interactive Productivity System Facility (ISPF), which were originally designed to provide interactive or batch oriented interfaces to MVS system and host application services, do not provide a means of maintaining a stateful connection to networked applications such as web and client server applications.
Current implementations to provide TSO and ISPF services to networked clients include submitting a batch job which runs TSO or starting and stopping a TSO session on each call from the client to the host. Terminal oriented TSO and ISPF services are also currently provided by applications which emulate 3270 terminals by reading and writing 3270 data streams, a process often referred to as ‘screen scraping’.
Establishment of a user session involves TSO initialization, data set allocations and ISPF initialization before an ISPF service call request may be made. The current methods of providing TSO/ISPF services suffers from the disadvantage of having to incur the overhead involved in having to establish a new session for every service request which requires TSO or ISPF services.